Connecticut College China Yunnan/Mekong Project

Staff

Liu Xiaojin, Director of Yuansheng Music and Dance Studio under BAMA Mountain Culture Research Institute. Born in Tianjin, China, she received her BA degree in Chinese Literature from Yunnan University in 1982. Since 1984 she has been a director of documentary films for the Yunnan Television Station; she has been producing independent films since 1990 and worked with China Central Television in Beijing in 1995. She was an Asian Cultural Council grantee in 2000 and spent seven months in New York City studying American documentary films. Her documentary credits include “Chronicles of the Minority Institute,” screened at the 2003 Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival and “Mask: A Field Report on Masked Performance,” shown at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in 2003.

Les Dickert (Lighting Designer) is well known for his ballet and modern dance lighting. He has designed many pieces for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, collaborating with noted choreographers Lucinda Childs, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Richard Move. For the Robbins' Foundation, he has set the lighting for Other Dances, In the Night, Two and Three Part Inventions, The Concert, Interplay, and Fancy Free. His lighting has also premiered at Teatro di Argentina (Rome), Izmir Dance Festival (Izamir), Theatre Dunois (Paris), Theater des Augenblicks (Vienna), World Expo '98 (Lisbon), International Buda Stage (Budapest), 1998 International Dance Festival (Connecticut College), Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, Clark Studio Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, York Theater, Ohio Theater, Florence Gould Hall, Kaye Playhouse, and numerous other events.. He is a Graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Gao Du (Artistic Advisor) is Professor of Chinese Folk Dance at the Beijing Dance Academy. He was one of the first college graduates after the Cultural Revolution, receiving degrees in Chinese Folk Dance in 1984. Professor Gao has been a leading creative force in China in choreography for staged folk dance. He is the recipient of numerous national awards in China including the golden award for choreography in the 2004 National Dance Competition. In recent years, he has been exploring the creation of staged performances that better reflect indigenous expressions, including the dance drama: “Shan-gri-la” for the Diqin Song and Dance Company in Yunnan that will tour Germany in the fall of 2005. Professor Gao and Professor Lan-Lan Wang, have been collaborating for the past twenty-five years and have produced many exchange events both in China and the United States. Professor Gao’s works have been performed in the United States, France, Germany, Canada, Egypt, Belgium, Luxemburg, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, etc.

Hu Xiaogang (Set Designer) studied stage design at the Beijing People’s Theatre, and studied painting under the famous artists Wang Huaiqing and Li Zhongliang. He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of the Arts in 1987. He has designed the backdrops for over 50 stage events including plays, dance theatre and acrobatic theatre; his designs have been seen in over ten countries, including Japan, the United States, Canada and Germany including the play Zen, which was performed at the Royal Dutch Theatre. Hu Xiaogang has held solo oil and watercolor painting exhibitions in 1997, 1999 and 2002. He established the Hu Xiaogang Art Studio in 2000. Now recognized nationally, he is a member of the Chinese Oil Painter’s Association, executive advisor for the Yunnan Oil Painter’s Association and a member of the Yunnan Watercolor Painting Council.

Lan-Lan Wang (Producer) has been the chair of the dance department at Connecticut College since 1994. Born in Taiwan, she came to the United States at the age of fourteen. She was on the faculty at the University of Iowa (1980-90) and UCLA (1990-94) before she assumed the position of chair at Connecticut College in 1994. She was one of the first American modern dancers to teach and perform in China after the Cultural Revolution in 1978. A specialist in scholarship and cultural exchanges with China, she has received numerous grants. She has directed and produced several major projects include US-China Dance Exchange Project at the University of Iowa (1980-1989): Symposium on New Waves of Chinese Contemporary Culture in 1997; and the 1998 International Dance Festival at Connecticut College. In 2002, Wang received a planning grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a project on the presentation and preservation of ethnic cultures in Yunnan China. As a result Yunnan China /Mekong Project was created at Connecticut College to partner with organizations in the US and the Mekong countries. Wang is also a choreographer with forty original works and three operas to her credit. She has performed and taught in many countries and throughout the United States.

Jeff Crosby (Tour Interpreter) is a graduate of the University of Vermont who now lives in Kunming, Yunnan. He first traveled to Kunming in 2000, where he studied Chinese at Yunnan University. His translations include numerous documentary films about the cultures of Yunnan Province, articles about the region's history and books about southwestern Chinese contemporary art. He has worked as an organizer and interpreter for hundreds of art exhibitions and large cultural and academic exchange events including the Yunfest International Film Festival (I & II), Lijiang Triangle International Artists' Workshop, Yunnan International Visual Anthropology Symposium, the Second Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival and the Nordisk-Kunming International Poetry Week. He is now director of Kunming Land Group's International Projects Consulting and Research Division.